Author: azeeadmin

We’ve chronicled, in great detail, the many layers of technology, services and solutions, that have been wrapped around the world of education in recent years — and especially in the last year, which became a high watermark for digital learning tools because of Covid-19. Today, a startup called Merlyn Mind is coming out of stealth with a proposition that it believes helps tie a lot of this together in the K-12 classroom — a “digital assistant” that comes in the form of a piece of custom hardware and software to “read” natural voice and remote control commands from a teacher to control multimedia apps on a screen of choice. Along with this, Merlyn Mind is announcing $29 million in initial funding to build out its vision.

The funding is being led by specialist edtech investor Learn Capital, with other unnamed investors participating. It comes after Merlyn Mind spent about three years quietly building its first release and more recently piloting the service in 50+ classrooms in more than 20 schools.

Co-founded by longtime IBM scientists Satya Nitta (the CEO), Ravi Kokku, and Sharad Sundararajan — all of whom spent several years leading education efforts in IBM’s Watson AI research division — Merlyn Mind is coming to the market with a patented, vertically integrated solution to solve what Nitta told me in an interview he believes and has seen first-hand to be a fundamental pain point in the world of edtech.

In effect, education and technology may have now been merged into a single term as far as the tech world is concerned, but in terms of practical, on-the-ground application, many teachers are not making the most of the tools they have in the classroom. The majority are, he believes, facing “cognitive overload” (which is not to mention the kids, who themselves probably are facing the same: a problem for it to tackle down the road, I hope), and they need help.

To be fair, this problem existed before the pandemic, with research from McKinsey & Co. published in 2020 (and gathered earlier) finding that teachers were already spending more than half of their time on administrative tasks, not teaching or thinking about how and what to teach or what help specific students might need. Other research from Learn Platform found that teachers potentially have as many as 900 different applications that they can use in a classroom (in practice, Nitta told me a teacher will typically use between 20 and 30 applications, sites and tech services in a day, although even that is a huge amount).

Post-Covid-19, there are other kinds of new complications to grapple with on top of all that. Not only are many educators now playing catch-up because of the months spent learning at home (it’s been widely documented that in many cases, students have fallen behind), but overall, education is coming away from our year+ of remote learning with a much stronger mandate to use more tech from now on, not less.

The help that Merlyn Mind is proposing comes in the form of what the startup describes as an “AI hub.” This includes a personal assistant called Symphony Classroom, a kind of Alexa-style voice interface tailored to the educational environment and built on a fork of Android; a smart speaker that looks a bit like a soundbar; and a consumer-style remote that can be used also for navigation and commands.

These then work with whatever screen the teacher opts to use, whether it is a TV, or an interactive whiteboard, or something else; along with any other connected devices that are used in the classroom, to open and navigate through different apps, including various Google apps, NearPod, Newsela, and so on. (That could potentially also include kids’ individual screens if they are being used.)

The idea is that if a teacher is in the middle of a lesson on a specific topic and a question comes up that can best be answered by illustrating a concept through another app, a teacher can trigger the system to navigate to a new screen to find that information and instantly show it to the students. The system can also be used to find a teacher’s own materials on file. The demo I saw worked well enough, although I would love to see how an ordinary teacher — the kind they’re hoping will use this — would fare.

Everyone knows the expression “hardware is hard,” so it’s interesting to see Merlyn addressing its problem with a hardware-forward approach.

Nitta was very ready with his defense for this one:

“I’ll tell you why we built our own hardware,” he told me. “There’s a bunch of AI processing that’s happening on the device, for various reasons, including latency and security. So it’s kind of an edge AI appliance. And the second thing is the microphones. They are designed for the classroom environment, and we wanted to have complete control over the tooling of these microphones for the processing, for the environment, and that is very hard to do. If you are taking a third-party microphone array off the shelf, it’s impossible, actually, you simply cannot.”

The startup’s early team is rounded out with alums from the likes of HP Education, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Broadcom and Roku to help build all of this, knowing the challenges they were tackling, but also the payoff once it would be finished if it all works.

“We have a very, very talented team, and we basically said, right, this is going to be a lot of hard work that will take us three and a half years. We have to build our own piece of hardware… and we ended up building the entire voice stack from from scratch ourselves, too,” Nitta continued. “It means we have end to end control of everything from the hardware all the way to the language models.”

He did point out though that over time, there will be some elements that will be usable without all the hardware, in particular when a teacher may suddenly have to teach outside the classroom again in a remote learning environment.

It’s a very ambitious concept, but where would education and learning be if not for taking leaps once in a while? That’s where investors stand on the startup, too.

The proof will be in how it gets adopted when it finally launches commercially later this year, with pricing to be announced later.

“If you’re the founder of a seed-stage [company and] you’re worried about your electricity staying on this month, then your salary is too low. If you’re saving $10,000/mo, then your salary is probably higher than necessary,” investor Leo Polovets wrote in a Twitter thread.

This tweet is just one of many in a now burgeoning conversation about how founder pay needs to change. The startup and investor communities are beginning to realize that many founders can’t go without pay for months.

Founders of SaaS startups are at an advantage in this scenario as the sector now has many companies generating revenue almost from day one, sometimes without needing to raise any funding at all.

However, the success still doesn’t tell founders how much to pay themselves, or what others are doing. To help with this, we’ve gathered insights from founders and VCs and narrowed down the most important factors and benchmarks to guide your decision.

A framework for compensation

Founder compensation is often referred to as a “founder salary,” but anchoring the conversation around the salary framework can create the wrong expectation. For example, you could try to establish a correlation between what you plan to pay yourself and your past or current value on the job market. Instead, the data we gathered indicates that founders typically take a pay cut from their previous salaries.

Chris Sosnowski is an interesting example: Before he “took the plunge” at the beginning of 2020 to work full time on his water data management startup Waterly, he used to earn “well over” $100,000. But he says his previous salary wasn’t a key factor when he set his compensation. “I decided to pay myself based on what I thought it would take to keep the company running,” he wrote to TechCrunch.

That brings to mind deferred compensation, which will be familiar to anyone who owns equity. Having put his own money into the company and owning the majority of it, Sosnowski is set to be compensated for his efforts if all goes well. “For the record, I do hope to pay myself back [a] salary for the year or so [it is] reduced like this,” he said.

In 2017, Paul Hawken published a book compiling a set of concrete actions people could take to combat climate change called The Climate Drawdown. Inspired by this, Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years, a firm that provides seed funding for companies aiming to make the world a better place, decided to do something similar to address systemic racism, and the Racial Inequity Drawdown was born.

Today, the company is revealing this document to the world and “open sourcing” it with the goal of making the framework part of the conversation to address racial inequity in startup investing and in the broader world.

Bannon, like many people, was looking for ways to better understand the impact of racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year. He began to think about it, much like climate change, as a huge, multi-dimensional set of problems. He wanted to understand the scope of these problems to use his investment capital to help address some of these issues.

“So we incubated the Racial Inequity Drawdown at 50 years and the reason we did is because we got excited about finding and funding companies that addressed racial inequity in the same way we do the climate crisis or disease or all these other things — and it’s really hard because it’s such a multi-dimensional issue,” he said.

As a starting point, he decided to create a document similar to the Climate Drawdown that looked at these issues in a single place to help him and his firm understand the scope of the problem, and to help them look at their investments through a racial equity lens.

“We started to pull together resources just for ourselves, so that we could have racial equity be a lens that we use for our own investing and we were like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a lot here.'”

That led to one of the company’s fellows taking ownership of the project with the goal of fleshing out a comprehensive document. The resulting framework is built on three pillars or broad sets of categories including Health & Wellbeing, Equality of Opportunity and Sustainable Systems with each pillar including different elements of the racial inequity problem that need to be addressed. And each sub-category includes a detailed definition of the problem, key terms, a set of companies and organizations currently working on the issue and what still needs to be done (perhaps openings for startup ideas).

Image Credits: 50 Years

To make it more than a document created in-house, Bannon and his team wanted to take it a step further, so he brought in a group of college students to begin reaching out to communities of color to participate in this initiative and bring it to life.

One of those students is Elizabeth Poku, a rising Sophomore at Princeton, who said she was drawn to the project as a way to flip the script on racism. “What I hope to do in the future is really hijack existing systems and structures that used to put down and oppress people and make sure we’re changing those narratives, changing those systems to really work for those that they were putting down,” she explained.

She saw the Racial inequity Drawdown as a way to help to do this and joined the team, helping to write some sections of the document including the one on the impact of lack of access to healthcare on people of color. She says that the team then reached out to communities working on the problem and began to compile resources into a database including startups that have been working to solve the different elements documented in the framework.

Bannon says that investors, who want to build racial equity as a lens into their investment process can use this document as a guide, and it also acts as a signal that a firm cares about this as it allocates resources to different startups, certainly that’s the case for Fifty Years.

“Part of this for us was just defining what that means, and now we have a really great start here. And then second is letting entrepreneurs know that we care about racial equity as a lens, and that if you are addressing racial equity, that’s going to be a big plus in our book.”

He added, “Obviously, that doesn’t mean we’re definitely going to be able to fund you, but that’s going to be a big plus, and we’re excited about that and attacking racial inequity through technology and entrepreneurship.”

The firm sees today’s launch as a starting point, one that others can build on and add to the conversation, and build on this initial framework. At the same time, it gives members of the startup ecosystem, whether that’s entrepreneurs or investors, a way to start looking at their investments or projects through this racial equity lens.

Image Credits: Fifty Years

“We really want to make this drawdown start the conversation and make sure this is at the forefront of people’s minds. That’s our main goal. So yes, if that includes helping community members really find out how they can [help] these startups get into the tech world, that’s definitely part of our mission,” Poku explained.

Zeller, a Melbourne-based fintech founded by former Square executives to serve small- to mid-sized businesses, has raised $50 million AUD (about $37.5 million USD) led by Spark Capital, the investment firm whose portfolio also includes Twitter, Slack and Coinbase. Zeller’s valuation is now $400 million AUD (about $301 million USD).

The funding included participation from returning investors Square Peg, Apex Capital Partners and Addition, and brings Zeller’s total raised in under a year to $81 million AUD. This amount includes a pre-launch Series A led by Addition, the investment firm started by Lee Fixel, and seed funding.

Zeller was founded last year by Ben Pfisterer, Square’s former Asia Pacific and Australia head, and Dominic Yap, the fintech’s former strategy and growth lead. The company launched its first products for small businesses on May 4, including EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) terminals, business accounts and cards.

The company says more than 1,500 Australian businesses signed up in the month after its launch, and weekly payment volume has been growing 200%. About 80% of businesses who started using Zeller switched from Australia’s four biggest banks, citing their desire for lower fees and better customer support.

Zeller’s new funding will be used to grow its research and engineering hub, including filling 18 new engineering roles that will support Zeller’s plan to become a fully-regulated business bank.

In a press statement, Spark Capital investor James Kuklinski said, “From our first meeting with Ben, we knew we wanted to be a part of Zeller. Australia’s business banking landscape is dominated by a small group of incumbents, and is ripe for disruption through simpler, more transparent pricing, best-in-class technology and better customer service.”

More than a million people migrate to the U.S. each year. Upon their arrival, they face challenges in opening a local bank account and accessing financial services at regular rates.

These challenges for migrants, a significant portion of whom also need to send money home, have persisted globally for decades, despite large government support programs.

Now an entrepreneur, who in his previous venture fought exorbitant phone tariff charges to help people make phone calls at low-cost, believes he has found the solution — and definitely a vote of confidence from investors.

MAJORITY said on Tuesday it has raised $19 million in its seed funding. The financial round was led by Valar Ventures while Avid Ventures, Heartcore Capital and several prominent Nordic fintech unicorn founders participated in it.

The two-year-old startup operates an eponymous mobile banking service. MAJORITY, whose name is a play on bringing financial inclusion to more people, runs a subscription service where it charges $5 a month to individuals and provides them with a range of financial services including an FDIC-insured bank account with early direct deposit at no overdraft fee, a debit card, mobile credit, and at-cost international phone calls.

Credit: Majority

Another reason why so many migrant communities are apprehensive of opening accounts with traditional banks, said Magnus Larsson (pictured above), founder and chief executive of MAJORITY, is that they don’t feel welcome there.

“You might not speak the language, or understand the cultural differences,” he said. To tackle this, MAJORITY has hired customer and sales relation representatives from various communities to work with customers to understand their needs.

Houston and Stockholm-headquartered MAJORITY also runs a community on its app to help individuals who have moved to the U.S. find familiar people and a “home” environment, he said. “Customers there find how to get a VISA as well as things like information about places to do local shopping,” he said.

“As veterans within the migrant tech sector, the team behind MAJORITY has already established themselves as builders of disruptive solutions for the world’s immigrants,” said James Fitzgerald, Founding Partner at Valar Ventures. “By supporting them for continued growth, we are confident that they will bring better and well-needed banking services to immigrants in the U.S.”

Starting today, the service is available in all 50 U.S. states and complies with local regulations, said Larsson, who previously served as the chief executive of Swedish technology firm Rebtel. Sutton Bank is MAJORITY’s banking partner.

The startup plans to deploy the new funding to expand its product offerings and broaden its team of about 80 people currently. “Since we are a company of immigrants for immigrants, we also look forward to hiring diverse talent that exists within the different immigrant communities we serve. This is more important now than ever given that many have been hit hard by the pandemic,” he said.

As venues reopen across the U.S., Mixhalo has announced a pair of additions to its in-person audio live event audio streaming platform: Mixhalo Over Cellular and Mixhalo Rodeo.

The first is, more or less, what it sounds like. Rather than relying on Wi-Fi, the leverages 5G. The company says it will be able to offer a similar “ultra-low latency” that made the initial Wi-Fi product so compelling.

Mixhalo is working with a carrier to roll out the feature, but won’t say which. It notes, however, that while it would work with LTE, for obvious reasons, 5G provides a greater opportunity to decrease latency.

Rodeo, meanwhile, is designed to work with existing venue wireless to circumvent the need to install an additional overlay system.

“The Rodeo system actually reduces network strain since the existing access points are now aware of the Mixhalo traffic and can plan for and buffer network data accordingly,” CEO John Vars tells TechCrunch. “If a venue has installed a wireless system post-2015, they are likely to have the necessary hardware to support Rodeo in their venue. We do need to install a server in the venue’s server room, but that is the only hardware component of Rodeo.”

Image Credits: Mixhalo

Co-founded by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, Mixhalo launched its product onstage at Disrupt 2017 (with some help from Pharrell), promising to deliver live event sounds through its ultra-low latency streaming tech.

Naturally, 2020 and the first half of this year have been a pretty major trial for a startup so tied to live events. Vars tells TechCrunch that the company was forced to reduce headcount at the beginning of the pandemic as contracts were ended, but adds that the company has managed to grow since, in part on the strength of a number of partnerships.

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 17: (L-R) Pharrell Williams, Founder and CEO of MIXhalo Mike Einziger and TechCrunch senior writer Anthony Ha speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 – Day 3 at Pier 36 on May 17, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch) *** Local Caption *** Pharrell Williams;Mike Einziger;Anthony Ha

“The silver lining in all of this is that we got a chance to step back and laser-focus on improving our core product,” says Vars. “These improvements include this announcement of Mixhalo Rodeo and Mixhalo over Cellular, as well as the capability to dynamically adjust latency based on physical position in the venue — we may not have had the time and opportunity to work on these improvements in the full swing of pre-pandemic business. With these new features, we’ve seen piqued interest from partners in the sports world and are excited to see this use case of Mixhalo really take off.”

Kairos, the startup studio led by Ankur Jain, is launching a new brand today called Bilt Rewards. Bilt is a rewards program that lets renters earn each time they make a rent payment.

The company is funded by Kairos, which is the studio that is also responsible for brands like Rhino, Alloy, and Little Spoon.

Bilt has two main pieces, a rewards platform and a credit card, powered by Mastercard.

On the rewards side, Bilt has partnered with estate owners and property managers including the Blackstone Group, The Related Companies and Equity Residential. Folks who rent with these entities can now earn rewards each time they pay their rent, with the opportunity to earn even more rewards for things like lease renewals or lease signing bonuses.

The co-branded Bilt Mastercard credit card allows renters at those properties, or any other renter, to pay their rent with the credit card. As a renter myself, and as one that is still forced to pay by check via snail mail, this is a welcome offering.

Folks who use the Bilt Mastercard will earn 2x points on rent payments and one point per dollar spent on the card elsewhere.

These points, whether earned through spending on the card or by paying rent at Bilt-partnered properties, can be used toward travel with airlines and hotels, as well as other perks like group fitness classes. But perhaps the most significant option for spending points is to use them toward a mortgage payment.

Bilt worked with regulators, as well as Fannie Mae and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to gain approval for using rewards points toward a mortgage. So not only can people use their rewards points toward their down payment on a home, but folks using the Bilt Mastercard can also build their credit score and earn rewards at the same time, bringing down the rates on their mortgage.

On the revenue side, Bilt takes a cut of the transaction fee alongside Mastercard for purchases made through the Bilt credit card. The startup also generates revenue by charging property managers for the points they distribute to their tenants.

“Three years ago, if you asked us if we could bring together an alliance of property owners to work together under one unified rewards program, it would have been hard to imagine,” said Jain. “If you think about getting payment networks to collaborate on a credit card or fees on rent, most people would have said that’s not possible. Getting regulatory approval from the U.S. government was a huge hurdle we had to overcome. Building out every airline and hotel partnership was huge. That’s why it’s taken three years. This has been the hardest project we’ve worked on.”

Squad used to be an app that connected people with similar interests for in-person meetups. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. While most social apps thrived under these conditions — people craved digital connection more than ever — Squad couldn’t operate.

Founder Isa Watson didn’t know how long the world would be in shutdown. Instead of waiting for a return to normalcy, she shifted the scope of the app entirely.  

Today, Squad relaunches as an audio-based social app that aims to help users deepen their relationship with their existing circle of close friends. Squad is an audio-only app, but don’t worry — it’s not another Clubhouse wannabe. Instead, it functions as a news feed of voice message updates from your closest friends, which expire after 24 hours.

You can add up to twelve friends to your “squad,” and once you post an update, your squad members can emoji react or send a private voice message in response — these also expire after a day, encouraging users to be more open about what they share. Soon, Squad will support phone calls, but there currently isn’t functionality for group calls or group audio messaging. But, users might be incentivized to talk on the phone via Squad rather than a typical call, since you can add a title to your call. That way, your squad member knows why you’re calling before they pick up. 

Image Credits: Squad

“There’s a big gap in the social landscape, because most of the tools are discovery platforms, broadcast platforms, and personal branding platforms,” Watson said. “There’s a huge opportunity for us to come in and help people maintain stronger connections with the people that they enjoy the most.”

Posting a voice update feels more genuine than a curated Instagram shot or a crafted Facebook status update (and Facebook is decidedly uncool among Gen Z and millennials). As the popularity of apps like Dispo show, young people are responding well to ephemeral, authentic social media experiences. But the audio-only medium could be a hard sell for people who aren’t already sending voice messages on WhatsApp or iMessage. However, while Squad’s initial rollout will be domestic, there’s great potential for an app like this outside of the US, where voice messaging is more popular. 

“A lot of the conversations that would happen on text message are now happening in an asynchronous audio type of way,” Watson added. “So we expect that to continue to penetrate further into our habits.” 

Watson raised a $3.5 million seed round in 2019, and she was featured on TechCrunch with advice on raising venture capital as a woman of color in Silicon Valley. Despite changing the direction of her app, her investors — which include Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal), Aaron Levie (Box), Katrina Lake (StichFix), Jen Rubio (Away), and Stewart Butterfield (Slack) — remain supportive. Watson secured another million dollars of funding after the seed round, bringing Squad’s funding to a total of $4.5 million to date. 

“One thing [the investors] said to me was, ‘Isa, you’ve been talking about this shift in social for years now, and people told you you were crazy, that social was all figured out and there was nothing that was going to happen,’” Watson said. “Now, people are buying into that change.”

Image Credits: Squad

Even though Squad isn’t a Clubhouse competitor, the rise of audio-only media is a good sign for the app’s ability to crack a saturated social market (so many social apps are trying to compete with Clubhouse, it’s a miracle we don’t yet have audio-only Tinder speed dating). In Squad’s beta test, 87.5% of users completed the onboarding process. Still, Squad falls victim to the same accessibility issues that plague Clubhouse and many of its clones. As of yet, Squad doesn’t support captioning, though Watson says this is something the company has discussed and hopes to implement down the road. Not only could captioning broaden Squad’s audience, but it could also further differentiate the app from messaging giants like iMessage and WhatsApp. 

Still, if you’re someone who loves to send voice messages in your group chats, you might want to get your friends on Squad. Currently, the app is invite-only with a waitlist. Once you’re off the waitlist, you get three invites. If you post for five days straight, you get three more invites, and if someone you invited signs up, you get two more invites as well. This continues until you round out your twelve-member squad.

You might well have a sleep app that tracks your sleep. I use Sleep Cycle, and have found it has started to even tell me when I cough during the night. It turns out you can run machine learning over how you might cough in the night, to detect changes in the way you cough. That data could inform people with ongoing respiratory illnesses and help them manage their health.

This is part of the idea behind NuvoAir, which uses both an app to listen to your night-time coughing and other health data to do just that.

The Boston-based startup has now raised $12 million in a Series A funding led by London-based AlbionVC, 

Perhaps because the COVID-19 pandemic made people more aware of respiratory complaints, NuvoAir claims it experienced 500% growth in the first quarter of 2021.

The round was also participated in by KAYA (formerly Enern), Amino Collective and existing shareholders Spiltan, Industrifonden and Novartis Pharma AG (dRx Capital).

How NuvoAir ai works is by combining the data from a Bluetooth-enabled spirometer that remotely monitors lung function; a sensor that attaches to asthma and COPD inhalers; and an integration with Fitbit devices. It also includes data from NuvoAir Cough, which assesses changes in nighttime coughing.

Its business model is enabling health plans, insurance companies, and healthcare systems to reduce the cost of managing their most severe respiratory patients, and also managing the care they provide.

Furthermore, it’s able to be used in the clinical trial business, where it licenses the technology to pharma companies or contract research organizations on a per user basis.

NuvoAir says over 500 million people globally suffer from chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, cystic fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). And it costs around $300 billion a year to manage these conditions.  The company claims its solution reduces urgent consultations by more than 39%.

In some way, NuvoAir is comparable to companies like Livongo (tracks Diabetes, raised $235M) and Omada Health (tracks chronic illness, raised $256.5M). All these companies are using increasing amounts of data about our health to manage ongoing illnesses.

The funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of the NuvoAir digital care platform in the US and Europe; advance the development of new products and services; and support NuvoAir’s partner and customer base for decentralized clinical trials around the world.

Lorenzo Consoli, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NuvoAir told me: “As a child, I suffered from severe asthma. I was hospitalized a few times and my parents were really scared when that happened. My grandmother died because of COPD and other family members, unfortunately, had severe respiratory conditions as well. On top of that, my young son has asthma. So I have naturally been drawn to respiratory health and have always felt the current health systems are not designed to help patients on a day-to-day basis, but only when patients end up in the hospital, which is always too late. But honestly, it was only when, by chance, in 2012 I joined the digital health team of Novartis Respiratory Franchise that I realized how much technology and healthcare were meant to be together. It was an eye-opener for me to realize that certain digital biomarkers could tell whether patients were responding to treatment or predict whether they might be hospitalized… Equipped with those insights and with my prior experience as a patient, I decided in 2016 to take on the challenge of improving respiratory health, and NuvoAir was born.”

Dr. Christoph Ruedig, Partner at AlbionVC said: “We’re proud to be able to support NuvoAir, one of the few digital health companies active in both Europe and the US. The company has built an impressive respiratory disease management ecosystem with strong clinical evidence and a scalable care model that benefits patients, payers and providers.”

This morning G2, a company that provides an online software review and information database, announced that it has raised a $157 million Series D. Per a release the company shared with TechCrunch in advance of its news, G2 is now worth more than $1 billion, making it a unicorn in modern parlance.

Permira led the round via its growth fund, while prior venture capital firms IVP, Emergence, and Accel also contributed. The investment also included capital from LinkedIn, which previously invested, and corporate venture dollars from both HubSpot and Salesforce.

The round caught our eye not due to its scale — nine-figure rounds are a daily occurrence in today’s super-heated venture capital market — but due to the interesting position that G2 and its rivals occupy in the technology space. They provide a guide of sorts to various software niches, not only exposing a number of competing services in a single space, but also some signal about what service might be a good pick.

For the immensely deep and immensely wide software market, offering potential buying entities — all companies, in other words — directions when it comes to software buying decisions is a position of power. And one that comes with a unique set of challenges.

G2 cannot simply provide lists of competing software products and user reviews. It needs to command a position of trust; if its users are worried that commercial interests are clouding its ratings and lists, the company’s core product could be compromised.

So, that’s what TechCrunch asked G2 CEO Godard Abel to discuss.

In response to our question regarding balancing G2’s commercial interests and review purity, Abel said that “whether a software vendor pays G2 or not has no impact on their rating on G2 and their placement in our category rankings which are 100% algorithmic and data-driven.” That’s a good start.

Abel went on to say that G2 verifies all reviews, checks the “business identity” of reviewers via their online profiles, and uses “NLP and AI to score and validate all reviews including preventing any reviews by competitors or employees of a vendor.” And, the CEO added, G2 has humans in the loop for verification as well.

The process seems reasonable, but the company and its rivals like Capterra will need to manage market trust as they continue to scale.

On that front, the CEO expanded a bit on the growth metrics that it disclosed as part of its release. In that document the company said that it added “700 paying customers for its Marketing Solutions in the past 12 months.” TechCrunch wanted to know what percent growth that number represented, and what portion of G2’s revenues come from that particular business line.

Per Abel, the customer number represented a 45% growth rate, and that that “piece of [its] business represents the bulk of [its] current revenue.”

Parsing that a little, seeing 45% customer growth in a majority revenue line implies healthy growth. We lack several data points that we’d need to convert that customer growth figure into revenue expansion itself, sadly.

With lots of new cash in the bank, G2 has plenty of space to keep growing. Its CEO highlighted international investment as a place where he intends to invest, citing “exceptionally strong growth across Europe and Asia as our international software buyer traffic and revenue have been nearly doubling.” And Abel said that his company will also “accelerate” its coverage of the software market with its new capital, along with investments into data work to improve G2’s recommendation engine.

G2 itself is now valued like a company that’s on an IPO path, which means that the standards we’ll hold it to have reached their zenith.